At a stealth startup, dozens of engineers relentlessly worked 20-hr days

This post is infuriating and a new nadir in "tweet leadership" right after that 10x developer myth tweet[0]. Engineers and game devs shouldn't have to destroy their work life balance just for making a video game for children.

This person should fire himself for this post, for even having the nerve to praise such an obtuse culture.

[0] https://twitter.com/skirani/status/1149302828420067328

140 hours and no ownership equals slavery in my book. It's sad that more engineers don't insist on working at meaningful-ownership co-ops and ESOP's. Working for somebody else's C-corp where they're all about the money rarely creates a good environment in the interests of workers.

Tweet deleted, archive [1]:

> At a stealth startup, dozens of engineers relentlessly worked 20-hr days, for many weeks, and overcame many obstacles thrown at them with the vision to make the public internet native to real-time comms. They went live today, and end users are blown away by the result. Hats off:

It re-tweeted another [2]:

> #FortniteMiddleEastServers ARE OUT > im from the middle east and the ping IS SO AMAZING

I'm guessing that's from this announcement [3]

> Today we’re excited to launch the Fortnite Middle East server region!

> Why did it take so long?

> In order to make this happen, we had to work with some of the world's largest cloud infrastructure companies to provide an awesome experience for players in the Middle East. Beyond servers, we also need low latency network connectivity to players. This has been a particular challenge in this part of the world given the number of countries, network providers, and varying levels of interconnection between them.

> In order to solve the networking challenge, we worked with a new partner to build out an optimized network to carry game traffic back to our cloud infrastructure in places where the existing networks did not meet our performance targets. This network is deployed on hardware running in data centers across the region with network connectivity to major end user ISPs and more than a half dozen terrestrial and subsea international private leased network circuits back to India.

I'm left a bit underwhelmed and confused. This sounds to me like lots of logistics and coordination to get things up, and probably cases where they go into a datacenter with 10x the requirements the datacenter has ever handled before, but.. 20 hour day for weeks? Why? Doing what?

And how is a "stealth startup" involved? Isn't this Epic Games -- the $15 billion, 28-year-old company with 1000+ employees [4] -- which to me seems like neither stealth nor startup?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190812150103/https://twitter.c...

[2] https://twitter.com/IcyTheCube/status/1159883184483557377

[3] https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/announcing-the...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games